In ‘Dreamscapes In Transit’, Johannesburg-based artist Leonardo Sitoe reflects on dreams as an evolving archive of migration, memory, and urban experience.
29 July 2026
For Leonardo Sitoe, dreams are neither private reveries nor fleeting moments of unconscious thought. They are living repositories where memory, history, and lived experience converge. Developed through the Bag Factory’s Young/Unframed 2026 programme, ‘Dreamscapes In Transit’ draws on recurring dreams shaped by the artist’s daily journeys across Johannesburg, translating them into an immersive Afro-surreal landscape of paintings, drawings, and sculptural forms. Working with reclaimed wood and found materials, Sitoe explores the porous boundaries between the human and the nonhuman, the personal and the collective, revealing how inherited histories continue to inhabit both the body and the city. He reflects on dreams as a methodology for artistic practice, the psychological afterlives of apartheid’s spatial divisions, and the possibilities of imagination as a form of resistance, remembrance, and renewal.
‘Dreamscapes In Transit’ explores the porous boundary between dreams and lived experience. What led you to see your recurring dreams as a meaningful artistic archive rather than something fleeting or private?
Leonardo Sitoe: For a long time, I dismissed my dreams as random occurrences. But over the years, I began to notice that certain feelings and situations kept returning. Over time, they evolved into vivid imagery, almost like they were documenting shifts in my emotional and psychological states. Around the time I started commuting daily between my studio and home, the dreams became increasingly anxious and spatially complex. I realised they were responding directly to my lived experience. So, for the Young/unframed programme Solo Exhibition, supported by the NAC and the Bag Factory team, I was eager to reframe my perspective. Rather than treating dreams as isolated events, I began to think of them as an archive that helps record experiences beyond conscious memory. They preserve fears, desires, fragments of conversations, landscapes, and histories that are difficult to articulate while awake. My practice became a way of translating this archive into physical form, allowing me the chance to reflect on my everyday experiences.
Muyon Mafulu (Curator): As curator of the Young/Unframed program, I conceived Dreamscapes in Transit as an exploration of the intersections between dreams, memory, migration, and Johannesburg’s spatial realities, positioning the subconscious as a space where the artist’s personal experience and collective histories connect. Working closely with Leonardo Sitoe, I developed a curatorial framework that foregrounds Afro-surrealism and material transformation, especially wood, which Sitoe is known for, in that the aim was to invite audiences to consider how movement, labour, and lived experience influence the dream space and identity. Installed within the industrial architecture of the King Kong warehouse, the exhibition transformed the space into an immersive dreamscape where Sitoe’s Drawings, paintings and sculpture navigate the fluid boundaries between reality and the imagined.
Your daily commute through Johannesburg becomes both a physical journey and a psychological landscape in this exhibition. How has moving through the city reshaped your understanding of space, memory, and the invisible histories it holds?
I feel Johannesburg is a city where history continues to shape everyday movement. Travelling between my studio and home meant repeatedly crossing neighbourhoods that were intentionally divided through apartheid planning, particularly under the Group Areas Act. Although these laws no longer exist, their spatial consequences remain visible in the city’s architecture, transport systems, and patterns of movement. Over time, those journeys began appearing in my dreams, but never as literal representations. Familiar roads would dissolve into impossible landscapes, buildings would mutate into living structures, and ordinary commuters would become strange hybrid figures. I became interested in how the subconscious absorbs these environments, transforming them into symbolic spaces where historical memory and personal experience merge. The city was no longer a backdrop in my work; I believe it became an active psychological force.
You describe your work as drawing on Afro-surrealism and African dream narratives. How do these frameworks help you imagine realities that conventional historical or documentary approaches cannot capture?
Afro-surrealism allows me to approach reality through irrationality rather than separating imagination from history. Dreams have always been significant within many African knowledge systems, not simply as fantasies but as spaces where memory, spirituality, ancestry, and lived experience intersect. That perspective is an important aspect of practice. I think rather than illustrating history directly, Afro-surrealism allows me to reveal how history continues to exist psychologically. A dream can hold multiple truths simultaneously; it can collapse time, transform bodies, or bring impossible encounters together. That flexibility enables me to speak about inherited trauma, displacement, and belonging in ways that documentary language sometimes cannot. The surreal becomes another form of realism because it reflects how memory actually behaves.
Throughout the exhibition, dreams appear to absorb and transform the anxieties of everyday life. Do you see dreaming as resistance, survival, or a way to imagine futures beyond inherited systems of violence and exclusion?
I think dreaming performs all of those functions simultaneously. Dreams allow us to process experiences that cannot always be resolved consciously. They create spaces where fear can be confronted, transformed, or even reimagined. For me, they are less about escaping reality than about revealing realities that remain hidden beneath everyday life. Within ‘Dreamscapes In Transit’, dreams become a place where inherited systems of violence are unsettled. The landscapes shift, identities become unrecognisable, and familiar structures lose their certainty. That instability creates possibilities for imagining different ways of existing. In that sense, I can say dreaming can be an act of survival and a quiet form of resistance because it refuses to accept imposed realities as permanent.
Your sculptures often occupy a space between the human and the nonhuman, while your paintings and drawings evoke fluid, shifting worlds. What interests you about these states of transformation, and how do they challenge fixed ideas of identity and belonging?
Dreams rarely present people as stable or complete. Bodies merge with architecture, animals, vegetation, or objects. I became interested in preserving that instability because it reflects how identity is constantly shaped by our environments, histories, and relationships. Many of my sculptures emerge from reclaimed timber whose surfaces have already been altered by termites, weather, or decay. Instead of correcting those transformations, I allow them to remain visible because they suggest that identity itself is always in a process of becoming. The figures exist somewhere between human, landscape, and material. That ambiguity questions fixed categories of race, nationality, or belonging, replacing them with identities that are relational and continually evolving.
Material plays a significant role in your practice, particularly your use of wood and found objects. In what ways do these materials carry their own memories, and how do they contribute to the dreamlike narratives you construct?
I never think of the material as passive. Every piece of wood arrives with its own history; its grain, damage, stains, insect activity, and signs of previous use all become part of the work. Rather than hiding those traces, I treat them as collaborators in the making process. The carved MDF board shavings resemble hair, skin, feathers, or vegetation, allowing the material to move between different identities. Found timber similarly carries evidence of time, labour, and weathering. These physical memories echo the way dreams operate: fragments are never erased but continually transformed into new narratives. The material therefore contributes its own memory alongside mine, creating works that exist somewhere between personal experience and collective history.
The exhibition suggests that personal dreams can become a site of collective memory, particularly in relation to Johannesburg’s spatial divisions and the enduring legacy of the Group Areas Act. How do you negotiate autobiography and shared historical experience in your work?
Although the dreams originate from my own experiences, they are shaped by environments that countless South Africans continue to inhabit. My daily commute exposed me to the enduring spatial inequalities embedded within Johannesburg, reminding me that private experiences are often structured by larger historical forces. Rather than illustrating autobiography directly, I use dreams to dissolve the boundary between the personal and the collective. The figures remain intentionally ambiguous so that they can hold multiple histories at once. My hope is that viewers recognise fragments of themselves within these imagined landscapes, understanding that dreams can become shared spaces where individual memory intersects with broader social histories.
As a young artist working across painting, drawing, and sculpture, you present ‘Dreamscapes In Transit’, an important moment in your practice. Beyond this exhibition, how do you hope your investigations into dreams, myth, and diasporic memory will continue to evolve?
This exhibition feels like the beginning of a much larger conversation. It has allowed me to recognise dreams as methodology and an archive, but I think there is still much to uncover. Going forward, I want to expand the scale of my installations so that viewers move through dream environments rather than simply observe them. I’m also interested in exploring dreams alongside oral histories, mythologies, and diasporic memory across Southern Africa. As someone with Mozambican heritage living in South Africa, questions of migration, belonging, and inherited memory continue to shape my thinking. Ultimately, I hope the work becomes increasingly immersive, creating spaces where sculpture, painting, drawing, sound, and architecture converge to invite audiences into shared dream worlds that blur the boundaries between memory, history, and imagination.
This exhibition was on view on the Second Floor of the KingKong Building, 8 Verwey Street, Troyeville, from 18 June until 9 July 2026.
